Thank you so much for visiting my blog and sharing your comments since March 2010. You’ve made blogging fun because you interact and use my blog. I’m very excited about the new capabilities offered on my new site, so if you’re an email subscriber, RSS blog reader, or if you’ve bookmarked my site – please visit Cards by Stephanie for new content as well as all of my old blog posts. I invite you to subscribe to blog at the new location and… I’ll see you there!

When I started accumulating lots of ink pads for stamping, I thought it would be a good idea to have a visual display of every color. I’ve had this ugly-but-useful display in front of me at my craft desk for years and it has been so helpful as I hold colored paper up to the stamped ink pad to determine which colored inks would work best in my card.

My Old Ink Pad Chart

Now I live in a new place, have a new craft room and wanted to get more organized, so I grabbed a really pretty Hawaiian flower (Hibiscus? Plumeria?) stamp from local Kent, WA company Denami Design and made it work really hard! This took me HOURS over a few days. Maybe if I were more organized, this would have gone faster? It took a lot of time to clean off the stamp after each impression.

Step one: stamping and stamping!

I have two jumbo multi-colored raised felt ink pads that I finally made samples of. I also FINALLY colored each of my stamp markers onto the stamp so I could see which colors I had. If you’re not an avid stamper, you may not know that brush markers are useful in coloring acrylic and rubber stamps – yes, you color ONTO the stamp and stamp it onto your paper. This is how you can get a stamped image with several different colors.

If I can see the colors of the markers and ink pads I have, I am more likely to use them. I don’t keep all my stamps out on my work space because they are all different shapes and sizes and they don’t stack well.

Step two: more stamping and labeling!

Once this was done, I trimmed out each stamped image, grabbed my repositional adhesive and organized them by color. I got them onto three clean pages – ahhhh, this is a breath of fresh air! I didn’t realize how stressful looking at that old chart was. This is much cleaner:

Ink Chart Project: Complete!

Click any image to see a larger version.

So, if you haven’t taken the time to do this for your ink pad and brush marker collection, I suggest you pick a rainy Saturday afternoon and make a chart like this! Thanks for reading my blog. 🙂

After returning home from Vancouver, B.C., I wanted to make a special thank you card for my friend Ian who was a gracious host while visiting his city. I made this Asian-inspired card with some special handmade paper I bought years ago at The Paper Zone + stamps from Local King Rubber Stamps + a VersaMark stamp pad + PearlEx powders! Hopefully he received the card before this blog post went live. If not, then you need to go get your mail, Ian!

I needed to make some friendship cards and was inspired by some fun sticky felt and sheet from a big stack of K & Company paper I’d bought ages ago, so I made four cards with them in shades of blue and green.

I’d never used the chipboard from a set of card-making supplies I got from Close to My Heart, so it was fun to use this butterfly. The white part is glossy and it resisted the ink I applied to the chipboard with a dauber.

There's No One Like You

It doesn’t show up very well, but I added a thin line of Stickles glitter glue to the top of the decorative paper. If you’re looking for a way to add pizzazz to a card, I highly recommend Stickles. I’ve tried other glitter glues and this brand is really the best. The stamped sentiment and decorative stamp around the words is from Close to My Heart.

True Friends

The stamp and decorative edger punch are from Stampin’ Up! and I also used my favorite Spellbinders to cut out the paper around “Thank You.”

I really enjoy using my Cricut Wild Card and Just Because cartridges. I used them to make these two cupcake birthday cards and I even made matching envelopes! I hope the recipient of the first card received it in the mail OK with that patterned paper. It’s hard to see, but I used Glossy Accents to make the cherry shiny and Stickles to add the pink sprinkles. The fun Decorative Label punch is from Stampin’ Up!

Recently Cheryl Bledsoe fulfilled her dream to bring Jeff Pulver and his traveling #140conf to the Northwest!! She presented the idea; acquired the funds to make it happen; coordinated about 65 different speakers; gathered a team of volunteers; presented a session herself; attended and hosted a few tweet-ups; and all in all, did a fantastic job pulling off a WILDLY successful and fun event! In fact, Mr. Pulver was so proud of what Cheryl put together that he invited her to be one of 30 VIPs for today and tomorrow’s HUGE #140conf in New York City! She flew there and spent the day at the conference – I am sure she’ll have a lot of fun stories to share with us when she returns.

Never heard of a #140conf? It’s a Twitter thing – we only have 140 characters to type a message in a “tweet” (similar to a text message), and this conference is publicized through and put on by avid Twitter users.

Jeff Pulver at the Vancouver #140confNW

Cheryl Bledsoe at the Vancouver #140confNW

This is the card I made for Cheryl with my Cricut Wild Card cartridge:

I have lots of friends who are awesome – and this card was for one of my music-loving friends I finally got to meet face-to-face. Here is the card I made him using Imaginisce “Live Loud” paper, matching ribbon, and Making Memories chipboard embellishments. I roughed up the edges with scissors for a “grunge” look and added shiny silver discs and a rockin’ belt buckle to the ribbon. After looking up his list of favorite bands on his Facebook profile, I wrote them onto the cassette tape paper at the bottom. 🙂